


Rock and Roll

by antennapedia



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Guitars, Tea, rockgod!twelve, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-29 20:57:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5142224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antennapedia/pseuds/antennapedia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Domestic fluff: a quiet day in the TARDIS. Well, not so quiet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rock and Roll

Today was guitar noodling day, apparently. Yesterday had been explosions and running day, and there had been three near-misses in a row in the corridors of a space station that was under attack from rebel troops, who were bad, and being defended by empire troops, who were good, and it all had to do with who got control of the planet below and its perfect growing habitat for some kind of super-tea. It had been very fun but confusing and exhausting, and afterward Clara had gone to sleep without even trying the super-tea.

It was breakfast time on her personal clock, time for tea and a bit of yoga. Not time for the utter squalling sound of the Doctor working on his finger-tapping technique at top volume. Clara poured her tea and tried not to mind too much. His guitar made him very happy. She had no idea how long the hobby would last. Probably long enough for him to cause even more havoc in the timestream than he had already by inventing metal. Or something.

The amp was from Magpie Electrics. He'd gone back in time to the mid-60s to buy the amp, muttering something about the quality of the valves and their manufacture date. Then he'd proceeded to do a number of completely anachronistic things to both amp and guitar to connect them wirelessly. Clara was perfectly certain that it was completely beyond even earth of her time, when everything was wireless already. He had a rack of pedals from about six different periods of Earth technology that often absorbed his attention for hours at a time.

Today he was just playing with distortion and a lot of sustain. Very heavy sound, not quite metal.

The sound shifted, cleared, and became something she recognized. He was playing the finger-tapping part of "Eruption" and scowling at at the fretboard.

"This," he shouted, over the ear-splitting sound levels, "is the easy part. It's an almost mathematical set of variations."

He hammered off, flicked a finger at the low E, and abused the whammy for a few seconds. Clara watched him over the rim of her mug of tea. Indulgence. That was the rule at these moments. He indulged her with her need to see new places and run away from new dangers; she indulged him by listening to him witter on about his guitar. Guitars. Plural. There was now a young forest of them with their headstocks poking up behind his armchair.

"This tea is good," Clara said. "I understand the war now."

"Ah," the Doctor said. Then he grinned at her in the way that meant he was about to be what he thought of as very clever. He shifted his hands and played a riff she recognized perfectly from a million variations, this one completely heavy and with a ridiculous flourish at the end. Van Halen still, apparently.

"Girl," the Doctor said, "you really got me now." He was showing all his teeth in one of those grins she loved seeing.

"You really got me," Clara said, after the next cycle of the riff. She drank some tea. The Doctor wandered off into something that she assumed was a solo. He was staring up at the time rotors instead of down at his hands. Showing off, probably. Back to the riff. He might be playing it for hours, Clara knew. Fortunately, the TARDIS had many rooms very far away.

He said, over the noise, "Odd thing. A Dutchman in California playing a song by an Englishman."

"An alien in a space ship playing a Californian Dutchman's version of a song by an Englishman."

"Rock and roll," said the Doctor.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the following tumblr prompt: _The Twelve/Clara fandom feels so doom-laden at the moment. How Clara will leave, what will happen to Twelve, the confession dial--all so depressing. I'd like to live in the moment & celebrate that we still have these two characters together this season. So, Twelve/Clara, they're totally an established couple, happy, domestic, fluff, whatever you want. _ I came at it a little sideways, with happy guitarist!Twelve and indulgent!Clara.


End file.
